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You might be right.

It is a shame too, because I like the look of the miniatures we've seen so far - which I guess are 'resin masters'?

The game/rules can always be polished/fixed later, but dud PVC figures will sink this one double quick.

Hopefully SG is just taking the weekend off (odd though that may be during the opening week of a KS) and will answer all questions and concerns on Monday.

I certainly hope so, as I want this one to succeed (which, technically, it already has!), and deliver high quality miniatures that match the samples shown to date.

 Alpharius wrote:
Good point on the scale here - it is...odd, and perhaps not as clear as it should be.

That one reference/comparison pic was a little on the small side too...


From the FAQ:


On scale:

At Scale games we have chosen to scale O (O gauge), where 7 mm correspond to 1 foot.
In this way a model of 1.80 m (6.8 ft) in reality, will measure 40 mm in total.
When we say that a human is 35 mm in FF we refer up to the eyes, not total, since is commonly used as a standar among brands selling kits of 54 or 75 mm.

Material:

Inicially, we want to produce in injected plastic but some items (vehicles for example) can be casted in PU resin.
In fact, the material is not closed and it will depend on the campaign result.

I think they should just tell us what the material is NOW, because they're 'fully funded'.

And they should tell us what level of funding will be necessary to get them all in 'hard plastic' - as I'd guess that's the goal we're marching towards?

Another thing that is pretty funny is the mentions that Dakka Dakka gets, and how people 'hate' and/or 'loathe' "Dakka".

As if "Dakka" is some sort of Hive Mind, or that there's some sort of majority or consensus here!

Ironically enough, the Kickstarter comments sections are the more likely place for that type of unwelcoming thing...

Pretty much my reaction when I first read their statement regarding the scale.



True, I would like the miniatures to be in line with my existing range of miniature, but if the game were to be excellent, I could throw that all aside. But reading the beta rules, I don't see that happening right now.

Regardless, It was that statement in the early hours of the kickstarter that I found puzzling and watching on with caution. They seem to highlight the scale with common train modeling lingo, not war gaming lingo. Initially avoiding scale questions and scale comparisons from the start.

And they avoid direct communication regarding materials and which manufacturers they are actively seeking. The only news information I have seen was a second hand source from an obvious over enthusiastic backer.


Beware the door with too many keys.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
from the comment section by scale games

"Hi all.
The material will be HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene). We hope you like it."

Why did it take so long?

What is there target goal to achieve this process? From the beginning it was stated it depends on how much funding they get, the game is just a few bucks past funding.

Who have they worked with to determine this?

Just seems like it came out of no where after concern has started in the comments?

Who knows, maybe they were approached by some manufacturer, maybe they approached somebody, maybe they managed to get a better/ solid deal, maybe the campaign goes well enough for them to invest the extra to make them happen, or maybe they evaluated the reaction for the first two suggested materials and decided that HIPS will be better for their future.

I'd still be very wary of this one after all this. I think I'll file this in the "see what it's like when (if) it comes to retail" category.

Update from the creators

Creator SCALE GAMESabout 3 hours ago

Hi all. 
The material will be HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene). We hope you like it.

.....There you are in black and white, they cannot go back on it now...or can they?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
New update

Materials and Stretch Goals clarification2 comments 

Like

 1 like

Finally to produce our models we decided to use HIPS (high impact polystyrene) for being an easy to glue and paint plastic. Among its other virtues include impact resistance and resistance to deformation.

As for the Stretch goals are aware that they are far apart and we have planned since start of campaign to launch a number of surprises when achieving other margins of success. (but if you say it in advance... where is the surprise?)

So without more, from Scale Games we wish you a happy Week beginning and do not miss our updates as they come full of content and surprises!

Best regards

It just seems strange to me that they would say "we have to see about the material depending on the funding" and now they are going straight for "its going to be this exact material". Either they are just trying to kill the fire, or they didn't have it figured out themselves prior to the shitstorm...

Or you could be reaching for conspiracy theories.

The reality of production and going for funding is that you can actually plan for both cases, then choose one once new information comes to light.

In this case, there's a ton of people complaining about restic, and them achieving the funding goal.

And can you really complain any further now that they've given a hard answer?

People wonder why businesses stay quiet on various topics despite people clamoring for a statement. The continued reaching for complaints is one of the many reasons.

 Denilsta wrote:
Update from the creators

Creator SCALE GAMESabout 3 hours ago

Hi all. 
The material will be HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene). We hope you like it.

.....There you are in black and white, they cannot go back on it now...or can they?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
New update

Materials and Stretch Goals clarification2 comments 

Like

 1 like

Finally to produce our models we decided to use HIPS (high impact polystyrene) for being an easy to glue and paint plastic. Among its other virtues include impact resistance and resistance to deformation.

As for the Stretch goals are aware that they are far apart and we have planned since start of campaign to launch a number of surprises when achieving other margins of success. (but if you say it in advance... where is the surprise?)

So without more, from Scale Games we wish you a happy Week beginning and do not miss our updates as they come full of content and surprises!

Best regards

Excellent news that they've confirmed this, I really didn't think they'd be able to fund it for all the troop choices. Going to leave my pledge in at assualt eb and boost it in pledge manager so theres no nasty surprises post ks updates.

Confirmed HIPS. Valuable lesson for manufacturers: listen to your backers, investors, and customers, but especially your customers.

Well, this is good news!

Now we just need to know if all miniatures will be HIPs, including characters, or just the higher volume 'troops' types.

Still, this KS just became a LOT more attractive!

 Vertrucio wrote:
Or you could be reaching for conspiracy theories.

The reality of production and going for funding is that you can actually plan for both cases, then choose one once new information comes to light.

In this case, there's a ton of people complaining about restic, and them achieving the funding goal.

And can you really complain any further now that they've given a hard answer?

People wonder why businesses stay quiet on various topics despite people clamoring for a statement. The continued reaching for complaints is one of the many reasons.

No, none of that. They are literally barely funded. Any less money than this and they get nothing. So apparently they can somehow afford HIPS with the bare minimum funding goal. If that's the case why the wishy washy answers up until now?

If 90k was enough money to afford HIPS then that should have (and imo 'would' have) been in the initial announcement and they wouldn't have repeated 47 times that the material would depend on the funding.

There's no new cheaper way to do this that has come to light in the last few days. I shall be 'very' interested in what happens if this kickstarter doesn't hugely overfund.

Again, you're reading what you want into it, with no real facts, just self-righteous anger and speculation.

Yes, they're literally barely funded, which means they can afford at least some HIPS molds and either expect more people to jump in from the announcement, or plan to operate at a loss and use the kickstarter funds to offset the costs now, in exchange for popularity and future sales.

Also, they're funded before even half the time limit on their kickstarter is done. In the history of kickstarters, once a project is funded, more pledges tend to follow unless they screw things up.

And again, they've hit their funding goal despite all these protests.

Likewise, they may also have gotten some additional loans that were dependent on their kickstarter funding to prove interest and other financial backing. That's actually pretty common, and many businesses keep such financial matters private.

So a business says it's materials are dependent on funding, then it gets the funding within an ample time limit that allows for additional funding, and responds to backers and complainers, and yet the complaining and accusations continue?

I'm not even interested in buying the game here, and agree the company and kickstarter has serious problems (such as rules). But I just want to counterpoint all this weird and self-righteous complaining that is almost as much misinformation as what this kickstarter has put out.

 Vertrucio wrote:
Again, you're reading what you want into it, with no real facts, just self-righteous anger and speculation.

Yes, they're literally barely funded, which means they can afford at least some HIPS molds and either expect more people to jump in from the announcement, or plan to operate at a loss and use the kickstarter funds to offset the costs now, in exchange for popularity and future sales.

Also, they're funded before even half the time limit on their kickstarter is done. In the history of kickstarters, once a project is funded, more pledges tend to follow unless they screw things up.

And again, they've hit their funding goal despite all these protests.

Likewise, they may also have gotten some additional loans that were dependent on their kickstarter funding to prove interest and other financial backing. That's actually pretty common, and many businesses keep such financial matters private.

So a business says it's materials are dependent on funding, then it gets the funding within an ample time limit that allows for additional funding, and responds to backers and complainers, and yet the complaining and accusations continue?

I'm not even interested in buying the game here, and agree the company and kickstarter has serious problems (such as rules). But I just want to counterpoint all this weird and self-righteous complaining that is almost as much misinformation as what this kickstarter has put out.

Absolutely none of that has anything to do with what I said. Loans depending on funding would still be known in advance so have been taken into account. 'some HIPS models' is not what they've said. You haven't actually counterpointed anything?

They have quite clearly changed their statement on material. There certainly may be some brand new behind the scenes reason for it, in fact that is the 'only' reasonable explanation as many of us in the business know the costs of what they are now saying they will provide and 90k isn't enough. Again, you'd think that this would be somethign you'd mention under these circumstances.

(And for the record a) loans depending on ks funding aren't actually that common and b) they aren't actually funded until the end of the ks anyway)

Just to re-point out, and this strengthens Arty's point re: affordability of HIPS, Scale will not receive anything like £90k (they are at about £92k right now). That is the headline figure.

KS fees will take about 7%

This leaves the headline figure at £85.5k. Then (and this is a big chunk of change) they will have to pay VAT to the UK tax authorities as this is being run via a UK company (if they ran it from Spain it would be worse, so I'm not cherry picking).

VAT is 20% (it's included in UK prices, so if you sell something for £10 before VAT, you charge the customer £12 and the £2 goes to the government). VAT has to be charged on any sales going to customers inside the EU (it's slightly more complicated than that but can we accept that as a resonable summation?). VAT doesn't have to be charged on any sales going outside the EU (USA, Japan, Africa etc).

If we assume that half the funding comes from the EU (I'm plucking a number at random here), then VAT would have to be paid on half the £85.5k (I'm not certain whether the KS charges would have reclaimable VAT, so I'm going for the best case for Scale number). That would be £7k roughly.

So out of the £92k headline figure, Scale would only end up with £78.5k. Roughly 15% of the headline figure will disappear in KS fees and taxes. If they get more than half their funding from the EU, that number gets worse (less than half and it gets better).

I don't believe they could do this tooling based on the numbers as they stand. They could have cash coming in from elsewhere, they could be banking on a large increase in backers, they could have found an ultra cheap method of tooling or they could have got the maths wrong. I don't know which of these it is, or if there's another option. But even if I liked the product (which I don't particularly), I'd be wary of putting my money behind it at this point.

Thanks to amazon payment fees the Kickstarter percentage is more like 8-10% (5% for KS itself and then a varying amount to amazon payments).

As they have unlocked a huge number of minis, let's do a quick calculation...

38 miniatures in the box set, which looks to be 24 unique ones?

The free 90k mini. 14 unique Sayx. 14 Unique Harvesters.

Then there's boosters, all currently available as far as I can tell. 5 Ares Light Infantry, 5 Ares Hyperion, 5 Riff Berserkers, 3 Riff Hulks, 5 Sayx Nightstalkers, 1 Sayx Vulcan, 1 Warping drone, 1 Behemoth (I assume these last 3 are just packs of identical minis by the artwork).

So at least 79 unique minis all of which are between 40mm and 50mm (some might easily be larger than 50mm). So will need considerable space on a sprue. The bases also look like they plan on being a sprue.

The scenery is just folded cardboard but they do have to produce a lot of it. The gaming mats will be more expensive to produce.

Vehicle will likely be in resin, but there's 2 of those currently involved 2 (maybe 4).

Rulebooks, dice, cards, the game box.

They are also selling their paint sets and a dvd.

So never mind that they won't get the 90k, there's a fair chunk of that 90k that''s not even 'for' the production process of the minis.

79 unique large scale minis in HIPS is going to cost a fortune. Sprues will need to be unique to individual codes at least so that's a minimum of 20 sprues 'easy', probably more, and due to the size of the minsi they won't be half size sprues or anything. So either they do have outside funding to a considerable degree or they are hoping this overfunds considerably. If it's the latter then just straight up promising HIPS is dodgy, so I hope for their sakes that it's the former.

Well, if this is going to be HIPs, so we've got to got on that!

It is looking more like they had a certain percentage of the necessary funds up front, maybe, and went to KS for that 'interest free loan' thing, maybe?

Either way, I'm glad we have some clarity here now, and that HIPs is the majority material here (still not sure if the characters will be in HIPs or...something else).

The daily performance charts on this one are....odd though:

Middle of kickstarters are regularly like this, especialy on larger ones.

There's the initial snowball and then there's a tiny spike whenever a stretch goal is crept past and then there's a spiek at the end as people decide last minute to jump on.

Ignore the rubbish about weekends on the comments, utterly irrelevant, if anything weekends are the best time for sales.

I suspect this will follow the same pattern and spike at the end. It's not like the rules are going to inspire a new bunch of backers, they barely exist. We've all had the scale and now material discussions to death so that's probably done too. Their stretch goals are medicore and widely spaced (hence the sudden reveal that they had secret stretch goals all along, honest guv'nor).

Their biggest worry is that a number of their backers a) defect to other big kickstarters, b) actually care about the rules and run screaming because of how pathetic they are or c) have read threads like this one and are now iffy enough to wait until real product exists.

They aren't even out of the 'defunded' woods yet either. If 6 of the 58 commander/shop pledges decide to leave they drop under 90k again (Note, I don't think this will happen but they aren't exactly thundering throught he finish line).

Yeah, at this point, the rather unimpressive and clunky rules are a bit of a threat...

The problem with KS is that the company isn't really under any obligations to fulfill what it promises during the campaign. So they can say HIPS all day, but you just have to trust them at their word, which thus far has not been very trustworthy.

I think at that point you'd be 'entitled' to ask for a refund though?

Which, of course, is an entirely different set of problems...

But, but it's so full of shiny that things can't possibly be flawed!

The blind faith that some people throw at KS is pretty amazing. Defiance had all sorts of people tumbling like lemmings over their cliff, all with a smile on their face because they allowed shiny syndrome to overcome their common sense and ignored that there were issues with the KS. Not saying that FF is deliberately trying to pull a Defiance, but a lot of experienced KS users have pointed out that there are some legit concerns coming from the numbers and statements that Scale has made.

I saw enough issues that I decided to pull my pledge, outside of providing some nice pictures I just don't feel that the KS has established enough trust and I won't back a project I don't trust.

Alpharius 17 minutes ago

Are the 'character' models all going to be HIPs too, or is there potential for them to be resin, metal or something else?

Creator SCALE GAMES 9 minutes ago

@Alpharius At first they are the same material

Ah..OK?

Does this mean that later on, they won't be?

I think obviously not - but it does illustrate some of the challenges this game is going to face in terms of translations and such.

 edlowe wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I'm confused. Who is shieldwolf miniatures and what do they have to do with this game? I thought this was Scale?

Shieldwolf miniatures are a seperate company and have recently launched a plastic orc warband box so know a fair bit about funding and producing plastic sprues. They were giving their own opinion on this ks.

personally I pretty much feel theres no way this ks will be plastic sprues but will definitely be pvc or some derivative. They would simply need a lot more cash.

Thanks for the clarification.

Nice to hear that they plan on using HIPS. I don't think it's unreasonable that they could fit each of the 4 starter armies in 1 frame a piece.

Its still pretty confusing regarding the material. As has been pointed out im not sure how they can fund all those kits at the current level. And their reply to Alpharius regarding other figures being 'at first' in plastic seems a bit odd.

I must admitt if I hadn't been sitting on an eb I'd have dropped out or down by now. I'm currently wondering whether I want to take a risk with them or not.

Edit - Didn't realise there were so many higher pledges taken, thats a lot of faith for a new ks.

 cincydooley wrote:

 edlowe wrote:

 cincydooley wrote:
I'm confused. Who is shieldwolf miniatures and what do they have to do with this game? I thought this was Scale?

Shieldwolf miniatures are a seperate company and have recently launched a plastic orc warband box so know a fair bit about funding and producing plastic sprues. They were giving their own opinion on this ks.

personally I pretty much feel theres no way this ks will be plastic sprues but will definitely be pvc or some derivative. They would simply need a lot more cash.

Thanks for the clarification.

Nice to hear that they plan on using HIPS. I don't think it's unreasonable that they could fit each of the 4 starter armies in 1 frame a piece.

What do you mean by 'starter army'? If you loko at say the Ares starter you get 15 Area troopers, one would think that's 3 each of the same set of 5 unique. Those guys are 45mm tall and definitely won't be single piece at 'all' if going the HIPS route. Throw in the other 4 figures and that would be 19 figures.

You think you can fit 19 multipart 40 oddmm figures on one plastic sprue? There's not a chance in hell. They'll be lucky to fit just the 5 basic Ares troopers on one sprue imo, and it'll be a full size sprue. Then 'maybe' the other 4 on one sprue. And if they go that route they can't sell the other 4 as individual minis, only as the set of4 (unless they waste more sprue space putting in separators to allow it to be cut up.)

The Riff will need 3 separate sprues and again that's ony if they include all the characters on one sprue and a sprue for every separate booster and starter etc. as they're already included in people's pledges.

Yes. I think they could fit the Ares starter on one imperial knight sized sprue, broken in half, as GW tends to do to package them without the box taking up too much space.

 cincydooley wrote:
Yes. I think they could fit the Ares starter on one imperial knight sized sprue, broken in half, as GW tends to do to package them without the box taking up too much space.

The IK sprue is around 300x200mm? And you think the could fit 19 40-50mm multipart minis on it?

You'd be hard pressed to do what I figure they'll have to and make a half sprue of the 5 basic ares troopers (as they'll need multiples for each starter set). Then the other half sprue would be 4 individuals that you couldn't split and sell separately 'and' if they paid for a full sprue they'd have a huge build up of that half of the sprue as you need 3 of the troopers for each game box leaving 2 to go in the spares pile.

The Riff box would need 3 half sprues easy. And again, all the boosters would need their own half sprues and if you go the half sprue route you constantly build up spares for any pairs that don't sell equally to each other. While plastic isn't exactly expensive you don't really want hundreds and hundreds of sprues building up of one half of a pair.

All of this really does make me think that they've got money from somewhere else funding a lot of this, and the Kickstarter campaign is a "bonus", and interest free loan, a, dare I say it?, kick start to the project.

Some one or thing may have said, "Raise £90K and I'll back you on this project with £(X) matching funds" or something similar.

Otherwise, it is hard to see how they'll be able to afford all these molds.

Unless Wargames Factory offers really good deals?

At the potential 'cost' of project delays?

 Alpharius wrote:
Unless Wargames Factory offers really good deals?

WargamesFactory isn't that good of a deal, and they are not taking on new clients.

I have to say this is boarding on a witch hunt now, the scale (sorted), the materials (sorted) and now it's the rules and the estimated production costs...

The point is, this is a KS, there is always risks when ever you buy into them. I have been badly burnt twice with SW and Drake but as an adult I look at a new KS and make a decision. People like Artimus have raised valid points but it is now just flogging a dead horse.....let people back it, if it goes wrong after reading all the comments well it's their money to lose, and there's nothing worse than the nerd rage that usually follows poorly executed KSer's!
I know a lot of you have said you are not going to buy into this KS, but you have all clearly made your point (repeatedly), move on to a KS you can support positively, or even a different KS you can kick in the proverbial nuts.